Life Or Death By Mengele Was A Horror

As ''The Angel of Death,'' Josef Mengele decided which prisoners at the Nazis' Auschwitz concentration camp were sent to the gas chamber and which he would use in his macabre experiments.

Mengele was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 people in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He fled to South America at the end of World War II and obtained Paraguayan citizenship in 1959 but it was revoked in 1979 under international pressure.

He became the most wanted criminal in the world -- with a bounty of $3.5 million on his head, though it was not known whether he was still alive.

Reports came up from time to time over the years that he had been seen in various parts of the world. One such report in October placed him in the United States. Mengele's former secretary, Margaret Englander, said she believed he was in West Germany.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center said in January it had obtained documents that indicate Mengele might have been arrested and released in the U.S. occupation zone of Vienna in 1947 and later might have entered Canada.

West Germany said March 1 it had appealed to the United States and 12 other nations for help in capturing Mengele. A Bonn government spokesman said Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Italy, Colombia, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, the United States and Venezuela were asked to help track him down.

U.S. Attorney General William French Smith said Feb. 6 that the Justice Department would begin an intensive hunt for Mengele.

That was the same day an international panel in Jerusalem appealed to ''all governments, all heads of religions and creeds, all international associations'' to help bring Mengele to trial.

Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld said she was convinced Mengele was in Paraguay because one of the sponsors of his citizenship there is Aleandro von Eckstein, a longtime friend of Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner.

Von Eckstein also was a friend of Hans Rudel, the Nazi fighter pilot-hero who visited Paraguay often until his death in 1982. Klarsfeld said Rudel was a neo-Nazi and friends of the wealthy Mengele family. She believed he carried money from Germany to Paraguay to support Mengele.

''Mengele is too old to hide in the jungle. He is 73 and needs a doctor. He needs protection. Somebody in the Paraguayan security services knows where he is or where he went,'' Klarsfeld said.

Mengele's shadowy post-war existence lent itself to invented portrayals of him in numerous books and films. Among them was Marathon Man.